Technologies of Navigation & Wayfinding

Humans are unique among animals because we are the only species to have populated every area of the globe. Throughout millennia, our movement about the world let us connect to the environment and notice the subtleties of it. We built out internal maps of the spaces we lived in and developed a sense of ‘place’ in our memory. Author M. R. O’Connor suggests that by moving through the world we create stories of the land with “origins, sequences, paths, routes, and destinations that make up narratives with starting points, middles, and arrivals" (p. 6). Now, we are able to fly across the world and arrive in a destination in the time that would have taken our ancestors years or even decades. What do we lose when we travel so quickly? What do we lose when we no longer have to pay attention to the physical space we travel through and instead rely on navigation and wayfinding to the GPS (Global Positioning System) on our smartphone?

First, we need to consider just what is meant by navigation and wayfinding. According to author Greg Milner (2016) "navigation is the process of determining a route. The way we visualize executing that route is called wayfinding" (emphasis mine, p. 17). When we think about how people used to navigate, most of us in the United States probably picture someone with a physical road map or, maybe a compass. We think of a map as the tool of navigation. A person would navigate by determining where they are on the map and planning the roads to take to travel to their end destination. They would then wayfind by paying attention to road signs, how far they had traveled, and other features of the environment relevant to the route they planned. Now most people use GPS, which does both the navigating and the wayfinding for us. This eliminates our need to pay attention and causes far less engagement with the world and environment. M. R. O'Connor (2019) asked, "What happens when we outsource navigation to a gadget?" (p. 5).

Before even those tools of navigation that many would consider rudimentary [simple], people relied on the stars, the sun, and landmarks to navigate and find their way through the world. Maps are a human invention—a representation of a particular point of view, on a certain scale, and with a specific set of priorities—and we extend the map metaphor onto all aspects of human life. Tim Ingold, a social anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen, argued "that extending the map metaphor into the domain of cognition ignores the wisdom and practical sensibility of the navigator, divorcing tradition from locality, culture from place, and traditional knowledge from the environmentally situated experience of practitioners. It is, in other words, not how most humans actually experience the world" (O'Connor, 2019, p. 213). Even though we can pinpoint our location at any given time, we feel more disconnected with the world around us. What do maps actually tell you about the world? How much do maps and GPS technology affect how we view the environment we move through? You might ask yourself, do I control maps or do maps control me?

To continue investigating technologies of navigation and wayfinding, you can review the sources below and complete one of the suggested activities.

Source 1: Timeline

2022, Ryan Smits (Civics of Technology contributor)

Source 2: How Humans Navigate Videos

Source 2a: Polynesian Wayfinders

2017, TED-Ed YouTube Channel — Alan Tamayose and Shantell De Silva

Source 2b: Song Lines

2013, Queensland Rural Medical Education Limited YouTube Channel

Source 2c: European Sailors

2014, thecuriousengineer YouTube Channel

Source 2d: How GPS Works

2019, BRIGHT SIDE YouTube Channel

Source 3: The Beginning of Voyages Museum Exhibit

No date, Korea National Maritime Museum as curated by Google Arts & Culture

Source 4: Is GPS Ruining Our Ability to Navigate for Ourselves?

2015, Vox Media — Joseph Stromberg

Source 5: The Subjectivity of Maps

2014, Quartz — David Yanofsky

Source 6: Why All World Maps are Wrong

2016, Vox YouTube Channel

Source 7: Critical Excerpt on Navigation

2019, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World book by M. R. O’Connor

For a long time I kept returning to that feeling of disorientation in New Mexico [her GPS navigation to a hot spring led her down a dirt road that ended fifty yards from a cliff]. I was struck by the power of a device to influence the way I moved through the world, how it subsumed my attention, mediated my perception, and lulled me into something like passivity. The way I viewed technology in my hand changed; I felt suspicious. I was twenty-six when the first smartphone equipped with navigation technology was released, old enough that I’d spent my adolescence and the start of my adulthood relying on experience, habit, exploration, paper maps, signage, word of mouth, and trial and error to find my way around. I bought a smartphone in graduate school to get around the streets of New York City’s outer boroughs as I hunted for stories and raced to cover breaking news as a newspaper reporter. Just a few decades before, the U.S. government had protected geolocation technology as a military secret [e.g., GPS]. Now I had the power to know my latitude and longitude to within a hundred feet, velocity and direction to within a centimeter-per-second, and the time within a millionth of a second, giving me an imperious sense of mastery over my surroundings. Quickly—alarmingly quickly, in retrospect—my phone became the way I navigated, and I was not alone in my new dependence. In 2008, the year I got a smartphone, just 8 percent of American mobile phone owners used a navigation application to access maps and find their way; by 2014, 81 percent of owners were using them. In the period between 2010 and 2014, the number of GPS devices doubled from 500 million units to 1.1 billion. Some market projections expect that number to grow to 7 billion by 2022, mostly by expanding the use of GPS outside Europe and North America. Soon there could be a GPS device for nearly every person on earth.

Personal satellite navigation devices are the apotheosis [perfect example] of a dazzling era in human travel, an era of hypermobility. Most people have the ability to go where they want when they want, covering distances unimaginable to our ancestors at speeds that would have seemed proof of time travel just a hundred years ago. What was once an expedition is now a vacation. A voyage is now a jaunt. When the Venetian Marco Polo set off to the East in 1271, it took him four years to reach Xanadu and the empire of Kublai Khan in present-day China. He wouldn’t see his homeland again for nearly two decades. In 1325 Ibn Battuta, one of the medieval ages’ greatest explores, set out for Mecca but ended up traveling as far west as Mali and as far east as China. It took him twenty-nine years. Technology has changed the very concept of a journey, a word that comes from the Latin for “diurnal,” meaning a day’s time. In Roman times the farthest one could travel in a journey was thirty or forty miles by horse. Since the start of the jet age in the 1950s, anybody who can pay the price of a ticket and possesses a passport can undertake what was considered a once-in-a-lifetime trip—what previously meant risking disaster, starvation, or death—in a day. There is joy in this freedom. Our reach is miraculous; our access unprecedented. But it’s worth considering what, if anything, has been lost in the shrinking of space and time. The explorer Gertrude Emerson Sen, who founded the Society of Woman Geographers in 1925, questioned fifty years later whether her fellows’ “travels today to the Arctic or Antarctic or any other remote area, when you can fly there in a few hours, can be quite as fascinating as ours were in the olden days, when we travelled by slow freighters or came, or on horseback or on foot.”

Truly, the speed of change in how we relate to space and time has been scorching. We have turned roads into superhighways, flying into mass airline travel, locomotives into bullet trains; our cars may soon be self-driving. Marshall McLuhan believed that “after three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”

We’ve had other eras of seismic change in how our species travels the earth. Our shift from mobile hunter-gatherer bands to sedentary communities and eventually states, what is known as the Neolithic Revolution some ten thousand years ago, has been described by Yale political scientist James Scott as a process of deskilling. At every step, he writes in Against the Grain, the skills necessary for survival “represent[ed] a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.” If this seems too bleak a view of human civilization, he argues that at the very least our shift to sedentary livelihoods led to significant contractions: of our species’ attention to practical knowledge of the natural world, of our diet, of ritual life, and of space itself. (The ancient Chinese, according to Scott, described nomadic people who registered with the state as having “entered the map.”) During this period, our need to venture for hunting and resources likely shrank. Some trails greatly relieved the need to rely on memory and environmental landmarks to travel. As the scholar Alfredo Ardila writes, “For thousands of years, human survival depended on the correct interpretation of spatial signals, memory of places, calculation of distances, and so forth, and the human brain must have become adapted precisely to handle this kind of spatial information.” Until recently, the vast majority of humans traveled without material maps.

Cheap and accurate GPS devices arrived in phones en masse just a decade ago, and already the era of paper maps and the challenge of orienting ourselves in space feels ancient. GPS seems indispensable, a psychic salve for getting lost or wasting time. Many of us embrace the device for even the shortest jaunts to ensure the fastest, most efficient route. In the Boston Globe, a journalist recounted a recent family road trip without GPS. Their adventures included using a telephone pole’s shadow to tell west from east and identifying Polaris; it was a holiday exploring “the old ways.” For those of us who remember the time before GPS, this lurch into a new normal feels abrupt, and the implications niggle at us. Weren’t the old days. . . yesterday?

The pace of technological change sometimes makes it difficult to recognize the questions we should be asking. But in New Mexico I glimpsed a question: What happens when we outsource navigation to a gadget? Even the previous generation of navigation tools—the compass, chronometer, sextant, radio, radar—required us to give attention to our surroundings.

The pursuit of an answer led me into unexpected territory. What exactly is it that humans are doing when we navigate? How and why do we do it differently from birds, bees, and whales? How has the speed and convenience of technology changed how we move through the world and how we see our place in it? By drawing on research and insights from diverse fields of study—from movement ecology and psychology to paleoarchaeology, from linguistics and artificial intelligence to anthropology—I discovered a remarkable story about the origins of human navigation and how it influenced our evolution as a species. And as I sought out individuals in three places—the Arctic, Australia, and the South Pacific—who practice what is sometimes called traditional or natural navigation, traveling great distances using environmental cues largely without the use of any maps, instruments, or gadgetry. For someone like me, who grew up surrounded by maps, this sort of navigation is a revelation, another way of looking at the world and thinking about space, time, memory, and travel.